Masaya and Piropos

So much to update you all on. I´ll start with my weekend trip to Granada and Masaya, which I think was about two weeks ago. It was a blast – hung out with my friend Liz who had been in San Ramón for a bit, her friend Rose and three of their friends from their community, which is about an hour southwest of Managua.

We all met up with Meredith for dinner, one of my friends from Grinnell who is working in Granada as a coordinator of a volunteer organization. I think we were all feeling like we needed a break from gallo pinto, so we grabbed some pizza. Liz, her friends and I went to a club and danced essentially the whole night, left at around 12:30 am and caught a cab. I thought we were going back to the hostel but we ended up going to the lake near Granada, to another bar there and danced some more. We returned at 4 am and I experienced one of the scariest car rides of my life. I won´t describe it here – I don´t want to worry my parents. Met up with Mer for breakfast, saw her sweet pad, and don´t you worry Mer, I have the photo right here to prove our reunion actually occurred.Mer and me in the central plaza of Granada. (We were looking at the flip-out screen of my camera.)

Piropos
I´ve gotten used to people yelling, Chelita preciosita, mi amor, I love you, bye (yes, they say bye here as a pick-up line. As I mentioned a while back, here they say adios as a ´hi´ in passing, so because adios means bye in English, they´ll switch it up sometimes and use that as well. The same applies for ´Te amo.´ I´ve heard I love you a lot as well.) . I usually don´t respond, pretend like I didn´t hear or don´t speak Spanish, and keep on walking without maintaining eye contact. On one occasion, I failed to demonstrate complete disinterest, which sparked a series of events that I will discuss.
A man down the street owns a few buses, one of which was being repaired. Starting about three weeks ago, every time I would walk by the bus (heading to work, come back from work for lunch, going back to work after lunch, and come home from work for dinner), the crew of mechanics working on the engine would whistle and one mechanic in particular led the group in these serenades. I didn´t even know what any of them looked like because I always avoided glancing, so as not to fuel their fire. One day when I was walking back to work after lunch, their boss was standing outside checking up on them. When he noticed me, he told me that I had an admirer and referenced the very expressive mechanic, I laughed and told the boss that I knew. The mechanic yelled at me as I was walking away, Te amo mi amor. The next day, I was trying to text my friend Liz as I walked by the bus. Once he noticed I had a phone, he yelled after me to give him my number. As usual, I kept walking.
I told Doña Marfa about this admirer and she told me that she knew one of the mechanics working there, and that if it was the same mechanic that she knew, that he was a very respectful, sweet, thoughtful guy. A few weeks ago she popped a tire and a young man stopped to help, gave her his carjack and then with her until she could find another tire; he told her he worked as a mechanic down the street. She told me that when we walked by the bus on our way back from Juana´s house, she´d check him out and tell me if it´s him or not. So we walked by and we almost walked completely past the bus when I heard, ·Mi amor give me your phone number.· I didn´t respond and kept walking with Marfa, but she turned around. ·Son, this girl lives in my house and I´m responsible for her. I don´t give her permission to give her number to people like you.· Silence passed and it seemed like she had physically hit him. We kept walking. Earlier I had explained to her that men in the US that whistled and catcalled were considered rude, and she said that here, there´s a type of catcall that is rude but the majority is not. – Marfa, does he have bad manners?- She laughed and nodded. We ate dinner at home; as she was cooking, she said, ¨Well, when we walk back to Juana´s house, I´ll just doublecheck in case it really is him.¨ Apparently she was having second-doubts. When we walked back, she yelled at him to come over; he hesitantly walked towards us. ¨Do you remember me?¨ she bluntly asked him. He nodded without looking her in the eye, ¨Of course. Did you forget my favor so quickly?¨ She immediately apologized and explained that she couldn´t see well and that he had been neatly dressed when she initially met him, so he looked different now that he was all dirty; she also said that it was her job to protect me so she had to be cautious about boys. ¨So you like my daughter Marissa?¨¨Yes, I really like her – I love her. Don´t you worry though, she´s good – she never stops when I say things to her.¨ He asked her if I was free to meet up this weekend and she said yes, and that we were going to Selva Negra (a popular forest in the area) tomorrow and invited him to come with us. He couldn´t but said that he could give us a ride back. She nodded and then told him that she didn´t have a cellphone but that I did, and prodded me to give him my number. So after all of this, Doña Marfa made me give my number to the guy who I had been avoiding. He coyly turned to me and asked, ¨Oh, you have a cellphone?¨ As if he didn´t know.
Somehow we made plans to meet up on Sunday to ´pasear´, or joyride. It was a 3-person date – we drove around and ended up at a bar, where we got rather tipsy and then had a group discussion about why I didn´t like this boy or Nicaraguan dating rituals. During this conversation, he asked me to marry him and told me that he was poor but that he could provide for me. All I could do was laugh. As we were leaving, Marfa introduced me to a former representative to the national government, whom she had worked with on the Sandinista campaign. He asked for my e-mail address and my number, promising me a photo of Sandinista.
Luckily that was the last of the mechanic, although I ended up feeling a little guilty for being so blunt with him. However, that was definitely not the last of the Nicaraguan men. I might even say that it was the beginning.